1. Trading David Hernandez and Kam Mickolio for Mark Reynolds and a PTBNL
2. Trading Jim Hoey and Brett Jacobson for J.J. Hardy and Brendan Harris
3. Signing Koji Uehara to what appears to be a 1 year deal with a vesting option for 2012.

I like that we've shored up our infield with Mark "The Sherrif" Reynolds and J.J. Hardy, I'm more excited for Hardy than I am for Reynolds, but by filling our 3B need with a 30+ HR guy will help. Brendan Harris will be nice to put in once or twice a week at any infield position to give Reyonlds, Roberts or Hardy a blow.

I probably wouldn't have given up Hernandez for Reynolds, but hey you've gotta give to get._________________

Giving up Hernandez hurt, for sure, but I think you're right in saying you have to give to get. Reynolds has big-time upside...I think he's going to give us at least an .830 OPS or so, which would immediately make him our best hitter (sadly). And 35+ HR power is something we haven't had since Raffy. He'll be fun to watch, at the very least.

If I was sure we'd have Hardy for more than one year, that would be my favorite. Guy is a wizard with the glove, and it should be really fun to watch him work. The other thing about him is that there's always a chance he bounces back to his 2007-08 levels with the bat. He's not old, so it could reasonably happen. And if it did...he'd be the best SS in the AL hands down.

I like re-signing Koji, and AM made me look silly for criticizing the decision not to offer arbitration. He got it done on a deal that encourages Koji to pitch as often as possible (to get his incentives and vest the 2012 option), which is a very good thing with an injury-prone gent like Koji. And really, was there anything more fun than watching Koji make hitters look silly with an 89 MPH fastball last year?_________________

We lost Pat Egan to the Brewers and Pedro Beato to the Mets. Both are righty relievers. Egan is sort of a soft-tossing control guy with some sink on the fastball. His main asset is a solid GB rate. Beato is a guy I actually rate more highly than Brett Jacobson, who was the main piece in the Hardy trade. I think he's got a shot to stick for the Mets...hopefully they won't be able to find a spot for him. He was their 2nd pick in the ML portion, meaning they'll probably be less likely to keep than if he was their only pick.

We did draft Adrian Rosario from the Brewers. A little bit of a puzzling pick, to be honest. He's 21 years old and has played all of 14 games at the A ball level (think Delmarva Shorebirds equivalent). He's got a good arm and good size, but I think it's pretty unrealistic to expect a kid like that to stick with the big league club._________________

I think we've had a pretty strong offseason so far. Really glad we traded for Hardy, and was really puzzled to see us dangling Reimold to get Bartlett to begin with when apparently Hoey and Jacobsen was all we needed to get Hardy.

I'm looking forward to see Reynolds play for us. He's going to get on base enough and hit enough homers to make the strikeouts alright, I think. An underrated aspect of his acquisition will be the improvement and consistency that I think we'll see from Markakis. He was definitely pressing a little too much last season because he felt like he needed to do too much. He didn't really heat up till the 2nd half of the season when Luke Scott started to hit consistently, and so I expect with stability from the get-go in the slugging department, we could see Markakis go closer to the .900 OPS and .390 wOBA levels he was around in 2008.

As for Koji, it goes without saying that I'm happy to have him back. If we sign Gregg, I think we've got some pretty good options to close down a game at any given time with Koji, Gregg, JJ, Gonzalez, and Simon all capable. Throw in Berken there and overall that's 6 relievers capable of doing good things.

All in all, there's very little reason to believe that we're going to be a contender, but even the most despondent O's fan has to admit that we've got a pretty decent looking team by the looks of it. In any other division we're easily an 80-85 win team, in my mind, provided of course the young pitchers in the rotation hold up and continue to progress. Unfortunately in the AL Ea$t, a shrewd trade to nab JJ Hardy can't compete with the Yankee$ offering $160 million to Cliff Lee and the Red $ox signing Carl Crawford for $142 million.

What does everyone envision being our rotation to start the season? There have been murmurs that we're pondering a trade for Kawakami, which I'm not really a fan of. Guthrie, Matusz, Bergesen, and Arrieta all figure to be locks. It seems like the plan is to acquire a Kawakami type who could also serve as a long reliever if Tillman or Britton nails down the #5 starting role in ST. Personally, I think Britton is ready and would love to see him win that job coming out of spring training, but Tillman is going to get every chance to win that, and given his talent I'd be happy to see him turn it around, though I'm not all that optimistic about him TBH. So we'll probably end up with a Kawakami type till May or June when Britton gets called up._________________

1. Trading David Hernandez and Kam Mickolio for Mark Reynolds and a PTBNL
2. Trading Jim Hoey and Brett Jacobson for J.J. Hardy and Brendan Harris
3. Signing Koji Uehara to what appears to be a 1 year deal with a vesting option for 2012.

Which is your favorite of these moves?

Subject to partial divestment?_________________

animaltested wrote:

On a scale from Kitten to Hitler, being close minded about music, and only listening to one or two genres is about a Boss Tweed.

e16, have a question for you. If you go to any of the O's coverage on the Baltimore Sun website, there's ton of fan comments basically blaming Andy McPhail for the fact that we can't add Adrian Gonzalez and Carl Crawford at the blink of the eye. Seeing as most of the commenters on the Sun website are actually nutters, it's not really worth arguing with them, because anyone who doesn't understand the economics of baseball at least enough to understand that we can't spend like the Yankees or Sox isn't really worth arguing with.

But with the MASN money that is theoretically rolling in, we are certainly capable of spending more than what we're spending now. Now, the nutters commenting at the Sun website somehow believe that we should have thrown $130 million at Jayson Werth to spend money for spending money's sake, and while that would be pretty stupid, it does stand to reason that we can take on a contract of that magnitude if it would be worth it (for example, we've apparently put out feelers for Prince Fielder. If we were able to strike a deal for him, which is unlikely, my guess is that we could give him a Teixeira/A-Gon type contract). We can't attract a Carl Crawford in FA right now and there's no point in spending $126 million on Jayson Werth, but that doesn't mean we couldn't have gone bigger on our Adam Dunn offer or anything like that.

So my question, because I figure you'd know this better than anyone else, is, how high realistically do you think we could get our payroll? $100 million? And with Reynolds and Hardy added, where are we at now..?_________________

We have 7 guys currently under contract --- Markakis, Roberts, Reynolds, Uehara, Harris, Matusz, and Gonzalez. These 7 will cost us $38.1M.

We have, I believe, 5 guys who are arbitration eligible next season (Jim Johnson may also be in this group) --- Hardy, Guthrie, Scott, Jones, and Pie. These 5 will cost us, according to my projections (a bit rudimentary but in the ballpark) about $20.9M.

We have 6 guys who are 0-3 year players under team control --- Arrieta, Wieters, Reimold, Bergesen, Simon, and Johnson. These 6 will cost us about $2.7M total.

In total, that's about $61.3M with 18 roster spots filled. Odds are pretty good that we'll fill at least 3 more spots with 0-3 guys like Tillman, VandenHurk (long man), and Tatum (backup catcher). It would be less than 1.5M between those 3. So my thought is that we'll have 4 holes to fill with about $63.2M committed.

The other question is trickier. Without getting their books leaked (where's WikiLeaks when you really need them?), it's tough to say how much impact the MASN money is having on this team's finances. I know when MASN was created, the team made various announcements about the cash flow boost it would be, and there have been some reports that have indicated that MASN is indeed profitable at this point.

What we know is that the O's supported a $93M payroll in 2007, when MASN was in its infancy. There's no doubt that attendance has taken a hit since then (down about 400k from 2007), but the MASN money has to offset at least some of that.

I think there's little doubt this team could support $90-100M. If they start winning, the attendance WILL come back. I have absolutely no doubt about that. If the team wins 80-85 games this season, the attendance will be AT LEAST in the 2007 range...and probably higher. In 2005, the last time the team was halfway decent, we pulled in 2.6M fans - almost 900k more than we had last year.

So, to answer your question, I really think they could pull off $100M. Will they be willing to do that? I think so...IF they believe they've spent it wisely and on players who will place us in somewhat realistic contention. They're not going to pull a "Nationals" and spend money apparently just for the sake of spending it. I think that much has become clear throughout MacPhail's contract. But if they win 85 games or so this season, they might just be willing to push the envelope on a guy like Fielder who could push them very close to the cusp of being in contention.

keysersoze3421 wrote:

e16bball wrote:

Thus far this offseason, we've made 3 moves:

1. Trading David Hernandez and Kam Mickolio for Mark Reynolds and a PTBNL
2. Trading Jim Hoey and Brett Jacobson for J.J. Hardy and Brendan Harris
3. Signing Koji Uehara to what appears to be a 1 year deal with a vesting option for 2012.

Which is your favorite of these moves?

Subject to partial divestment?

Well, I haven't eyeballed the contract yet, but I'd assume they would have written it "O's to U and his children."

Personally I would have gone with "O's to U and the heirs of his body," but I'm old school like that._________________

I was reading on MLBTradeRumors today that the Orioles and 1B Adam LaRoche have mutual intrest but haven't made an offer yet. If we could land LaRoche at a reasonable price, we could have a very solid lineup:

Pitching would probably still be a weakness, but we've a ton of potential in this rotation got a few in the pipeline to look forward too. If we could add a veteran starter and let either Matusz or Bergesen develop further in the minors, it could really help us in the long haul.

Why would we send Matusz or Bergesen to the minors? Both have around a year and a half of major league service time already. Not sure how you have Arrieta and especially Tillman ahead of them in the rotation when Arrieta was streaky in his call-up last year and Tillman was straight garbage.

Bergesen posted a 2.85 ERA over the final 2 months of the season his final 12 starts in 2010, averaging almost 7 innings an outing. He's streaky and was admittedly horrible earlier in the season but he really seemed to stabilize once Buck got to town and I think also didn't really get healthy until the latter half of the season. He's not a top of the line starter but for the purpose of our rotation I think he fits in nicely as a #3 starter to begin the season and then depending on how Arrieta looks can slide further back into the rotation where he should serve as a highly above average #4 or #5 starter.

Matusz was even filthier at the end of the season: Over the final 2 months in 62 innings he posted a 2.15 ERA while striking out 52 and walking just 16. Throw out one bad start against the Rays and he posted a 1.54 ERA in 58 innings over the final 2 months. He's turning into the ace he was billed to be, sending him to the minors when he has absolutely nothing left to prove down there would be mind-boggling._________________

I watched Matusz down the stretch last season. He was great. No way he should be in the minors. 4 of the 5 games he pitched against Boston he won, blanked the Rays and beat the Yanks in September, and since the beginning of August he only walked 2 batters more than once._________________

animaltested wrote:

On a scale from Kitten to Hitler, being close minded about music, and only listening to one or two genres is about a Boss Tweed.

Its all about the rotation to me. Matusz is on his way to being an ace, and Guthrie is very solid. I believe in Berg, but Im not convinced about Arrieta or Tillman. Especially Tillman, he was terrible and I dont think he'll ever be that good. Im hoping that Britton wins the job in spring training_________________